Nine Lives at Westfield High
by The Cry-Wank Kid
Summary: Nine stories. Pure, ridiculous fluff AU where everyone is alive and in high school together. Lots of cuddling. Expect some people to be out of character. I needed an angst detox. Rated T for some language only.
1. Diana's Piano

**Welcome! This is the first segment, entitled "Diana's Piano". (Runner up title was "Weird Science".) Sorry about the Tate-tears. It just wouldn't be a Cry-Wank Kid story if he didn't cry at least once. But hey, I got it out of the way early! Enjoy your hugs, kids. Love ya!**

* * *

Tate has had this stupid plague for a week now; it's his third day home with it, and he feels like crap. At least today is better than yesterday, when all he could do was lie under his covers, aching and hot with his breathing all stupid and jacked-up, falling asleep to _Weird Science. _Today he can sit up in bed and watch movies.

Violet comes over with his math homework. When she comes in, Tate is propped up by pillows. His overgrown hair is a mess, parted way off to the side and sticking out oddly. He's wearing a heavy, too-big cardigan with a moose print knit into it.

He looks at his girlfriend, dejected and glum. Something rawly maternal stirs in Violet's little teenage frame. Tate is as pale as his off-white flannel sheets, and his eyes are underscored by circles so dark and big that it looks like he's recovering from two black eyes.

Violet looks at his sickly cardigan-of-death. _Deer? _She thinks. _Poor dear,_ she thinks.

"Do you want me to make you some soup?" She asks. By now Constance is used to her, puttering around in her kitchen and cooking her convenience food and drinking up her wine.

Tate rubs his nose quickly with his cuff, hoping she won't notice. He looks like a sad half-zombie with smile dimples. "If you'll feed it to me," he says sweetly, in that embarrassing-to-teenage-boys voice he only uses for her.

She cooks Campbell's downstairs and does just that. She takes the whole thing upstairs in a big plastic mixing bowl because she couldn't find the normal ones. She sits cross-legged in front of Tate, the bowl propped between their laps, and pushes the spoon into his greedy, plump mouth over and over and over. Something about it makes her vaguely want to make out, or weep.

* * *

Later Patrick comes, fresh from wrestling practice, with history homework. He says, "Scoot over, Violet. I'm tired, too."

Tate is lying with his head on Violet's chest, all cuddled into her. He feels slightly annoyed with his gay friend for showing up and ruining this nice moment. Now he can't cry over dumb shit or talk about Star Trek or fart.

"No, get in on the other side," Violet protests when Patrick tries, "Tate's the sick one; he's cold."

"Ugggh," protests Tate as the six-three giraffe of a high schooler climbs over both of them and settles in next to him. It's only a full size mattress, Tate himself borders six feet, Violet has girl hips, and quarters are tight. He switches positions and lays his hot face on the broader kid's chest out of pure spite.

"Whoa," he mutters, congested and settling. "You're actually really comfortable."

"I'm stealing your boyfriend," Patrick says matter-of-factly to Violet.

"Whatever." She's blithe, vaguely spooning and now half-asleep. Tate can feel the thick fleece of her gymnastics team sweats against his leg. _Oh god,_ he thinks, _I'm sandwiched between two kids in school-sports paraphernalia. Fuck, I missed a track meet. Stupid plague. _

Patrick sorts through a pile of movies and puts in _Garfield's Nine Lives_ when Tate whines for it. Straight boys act different at home.

Tate coughs weakly into Patrick's shirt. Violet murmurs "Aw, Tate," and Patrick says, "Give me this crud and I'll murder you."

Violet dozes. Patrick strokes Tate's hair and Tate is undeterred and sniffles a lot. The _Diana's Piano_ segment comes to pass in sentimental watercolor, all kind words and omnipresent, gentle death, and Patrick's hand is still as he pushes embarrassing memories back inside him. He cried at this bullshit in front of his parents when he was like, six. He _hates_ that.

Tate hiccups slightly, his breath hitched, trying to turn away subtly. Patrick feels the hot drops on the side of his arm anyway.

"Are you _crying?" _

"Mmph,"

"Oh my god, are you crying over the movie?"

Tate whimpers into his pillow, half-delirious now from fever. His nose is running.

Violet stirs. "Here, Tate, do you need a tissue?" she slurs, shoving her sleeved arm unceremoniously into his face. No one can tell if she's serious, joking, or sleeping.

"Ugh, Vi, get your fucking wrist out of my face."

Patrick is dogged. "Admit that you're crying."

"It's the fucking cold medicine," he sniffs, spitting a little, "it does that, you know..."

"I know," says Patrick gently, taking his straight friend back into his arms. It's a feat like a wrestling match with a sick kid. He suddenly feels bad. He strokes the blonde head on his chest without a hint of irony or malice, just repeating that-"I know, I know" over and over. He's gonna get sick.

Violet wakes a little and holds her boyfriend from the opposite side, rubbing circles on his thin back with her thumb. She and Patrick both know that he isn't crying because of DayQuil or a cartoon cat; he's crying because his mom doesn't hug him enough and he is the weirdest, saddest, most awkward and most wonderful kid to ever wear track shorts and a picture-perfect face.

"Tate," drawls Violet, her voice sweet with emotion, "we love you."

Tate laughs deliriously, helping himself to a large handful of Patrick's shirt to wipe his face. "Fuck you guys..." he groans.

* * *

Years later, when there's car payments and office culture, Violet will think of this and feel a wave of nostalgia so syrupy and unbearable that it nearly cuts her at the knees. She'll lie in her organic, high thread-count sheets and watch her ceiling fan, not unhappy with her current life but certain now that heaven, if there is a heaven, is being sixteen and falling asleep in your mom's bed on a Saturday in dumb-looking pajamas to _Weird Science._

* * *

**Stay tuned for next time: Nora and Moira have a sleepover, and Moira is demanding about back rubs and lullabies. Oh girlhood...**


	2. The Sun Still Shines

**Well, we had two boys and girl in a bed and now we have two girls and a boy! I decided after much deliberation that this all takes place in the early-to-mid 00's, for no reason other than those were my own high school years. The song this chapter is named for is by LFO. So dorky.**

* * *

Someday Nora, well into her twenties, will peruse social networking sites, the faces of high school, of girls who hated her and boys who loved her. Her clothes, they had said, her personality. She's got too much imagination; she's wrong.

But the blonde girl, long limbed and slender, was gentle and soft. She wanted only love. She cried when they talked about her, her vintage dress riding up over the top of her Cuban-heel pantyhose on the floor of some burnout's bedroom in the suburbs-a silver screen star born instead to the era of Columbine, now brought so low. She bent, her elaborate pin-curled hair falling out of place and dropping bobby pins among the white lines on the floor.

_Make it better,_ she once screamed at one of them, throwing her shoe at the wall. She had made the mistake of asking if the designated driver had been drinking-there were bottles in the backseat, dammit, she was _scared_-and the girl had raged at her all night, a terrifying storm. For years afterward, Nora would look around whenever she heard the word "anorexic" in a crowd.

The boy, inbreeding-wonky and cocaine-thin, put his arms around her. Even he was smart enough to know she shouldn't be there. I'm not going to have sex with you tonight, he said.

* * *

It's amazing what a little love can do. The two of them seemed to heal her-Charles with his loyal, unemotional brilliance and his tired, sad silent movie eyes, and the way that Moira always acted as if she were seeing her favorite person, diving into her with all her limbs in the hallway, her hair dyed the most stunning shade of red.

Before them, Nora carried bullet holes, smoldering and visceral, on the surface of her chest. There was little padding, so that things-metal, gossip, hard rain-seemed to get through and bite.

* * *

"Sing," says Moira, stretched out face-down on the bed. They're in Moira's bedroom and it's late. The only light in the room comes from a small string of clear Christmas lights in one window. Mariah Carey is playing, Moira tracing the notes nonchalantly, her jazz-choir alto straining, trying to reach greater heights.

"You know," she says as Nora changes the CD, "I always thought you'd be someone who could sing. Ever since I first heard you talk freshman year."

Nora debuted last weekend as Roxie Hart in the school's production of _Chicago_. She was stunning, as if the role were made for her.

The stupid old boy band CD begins a ballad. Nora is wrapped close in girl-love, dressed in Moira's pajama clothes, the spandex camisole wrinkling and the cotton shorts baggy on her hips. Beneath all the bygone era clothes she's a little bit gawky, 5'9ish, a model or maybe a swimmer.

Her hands touch the pale girl's back, alternating between rubbing and little karate chops. She sings, her clear soprano sleepy and tentative, about a love lost.

Moira looks up at the mirror on the wall in front of them. "Your lips have a little dip in the top part," she says, "when you smile. I'm jealous of it."

Nora pressed with the heels of her hands and thinks about the weekend before last, when they went deep into the city to see Lana Winters, feminist icon, speak. She remembers Moira's thin fingers laced with hers in the big auditorium, the steely vibrance of her green eyes when they wept together. Afterward they stood in the drafty lobby and stared through big sunglasses into a Koi pond.

Nora sings, into it now and drama-club emotional, about how the moon still glows._  
_

There's a knock at the window and Charles climbs in, a surgeon's kid with a sky-high IQ and a face and posture that fall somewhere retro between awkward and haunted. He stands against the far wall like a ghost from another era, watching._  
_

The world still turns, she sings, you're somewhere out there.

Nora turns, his own milky retro girl, all sparkly can-do. She gives a toothy smile and beckons him over. The boy comes, stripping down to his boxers and climbing over the back bed rail gawkily. He buries himself immediately in covers and cuddles the wall.

The song ends and Nora climbs off of the backs of her friend's thighs. "There," she teases, "that's all you get."

She rakes her fingers through her boyfriend's hair, trying with gentle desperation to bring him out of himself a little, to unfreeze his bones, make him smile. The only sound in the room is dead, blank CD noise. The dark mess is unwashed, damp with rain.

Against her hip bones and the sides of her arms they are warm. Moira smells like mommy laundry detergent and cucumber melon lotion and it glows like hot cocoa beneath her girl-skin. Charles's is a little ghost-cold, clammy from outdoors, but the warmth stirs underneath it, needing to be rubbed to the surface, the sea-otter metabolism of boyhood.

They lie, and it's just another teenage mess in a four-post bed-a big, soupy mish-mash of weird vulnerability and gaping, sucking need-bones, germs, tears, and hair. "I love you," Nora whispers to Charles.

"I love you, too." He's barely audible. Nora's limbs relax, long and haphazard. She feels as if they're rubbing Vicks on her heart, closing the bullet holes.

"Nora," whines Moira softly, "do butterfly fingers on my back..."

The blonde girl turns. Her curls in Charles's face are crunchy and fragrant with hairspray. The tips of her fingers dance up and down the legnth of Moira's back and she sings again, acapella lullabies.

"I make my mom do this sometimes while I fall asleep..." the tired girl confesses, her bright hair clumpy on the pillow and her eyes shutting.

She feels Charles climb tentatively close, holding her. She thinks about his eyes, the eerie black-and-white like a depression-era cartoon. Outside the rain falls, and she isn't sorry, now, to be the gaping wound she is.

It's amazing what a little love can do.

* * *

**Next up: Chad and Patrick share a whimsical childhood toy. They're a little embarrassed. **


End file.
